Car insurer review
Auto & General car insurance
TIH’s founding brand and 2025’s top-rated insurer for customer experience, reviewed in full.
1985
Established
TIH
Founding brand
#1
2025 CE index
33
Highest NPS
The verdict on Auto & General
Auto & General is the founding brand of Telesure Investment Holdings (TIH), established on 1 June 1985 and now more than 40 years old. It was reportedly the first insurer in the world to use paperless, computerised, phone-based underwriting, a pioneering approach at the time. Auto & General sells motor, home, business, and life cover directly and through a broker channel, and was named the overall industry leader in the 2025 Customer Experience Index for South African short-term insurance, the most current independent evidence available on how it compares with its peers.
What you will learn
- Who owns Auto & General, and how it relates to Budget Insurance and other Telesure brands
- What Auto & General’s founding innovation was, and what it covers today
- How Auto & General performed in the most recent independent customer experience research
- What is known about Auto & General’s complaints record with the insurance ombud
- Who Auto & General suits, and who might want to compare further
Who Is Auto & General?
Auto & General was established on 1 June 1985, the founding brand and origin point of what later became Telesure Investment Holdings (TIH). Auto & General was reportedly the first insurance company in the world to use paperless, computerised underwriting and to sell and administer policies over the telephone using voice-recording systems, a genuinely disruptive model in the mid-1980s insurance market. TIH itself was formally established in 1998 to house Auto & General alongside the South African interests of Budget Holdings Ltd, a Guernsey-based international financial services group. TIH is wholly owned by BHL (SA) Holdings Limited, part of that wider Guernsey-based corporate structure.
Today, TIH’s stable of brands includes Auto & General, Budget Insurance, Dialdirect, 1st for Women, and Renasa, among others, with Auto & General generally positioned as the group’s more premium, flexible brand. Auto & General sells its full personal-lines suite, motor, home, business insurance, life cover, and value-added products, directly to consumers, with a broker-facing Business Insurance channel supplementing its direct sales model.
Car Insurance Cover and the Vitality Drive Reward System
Discovery Insure’s signature feature is Vitality Drive, a telematics-based driver behaviour programme that has run since the business launched in 2011. Vitality Drive tracks your driving through either a smartphone app or a dedicated hardware device, DQ-Track, developed in partnership with vehicle tracking company Ctrack. The system scores your driving daily, and better scores unlock bigger rewards.
Up to 50% fuel cashback
Clients can currently get back up to 50% of qualifying fuel spend, up to R1,500 a month, depending on their plan and driving score. Discovery Insure also offers a discount on vehicle maintenance for good drivers, and Vitality Drive’s technology can trigger real-time emergency assistance, including an Impact Alert feature that can detect a severe accident and dispatch help automatically. In June 2023, Discovery Insure rolled out Vitality Drive 3.0, built around loss-aversion behavioural principles, reporting a roughly 34% increase in average points earned per client.
Financial strength and Group backing
Auto & General carries a national scale financial strength rating of AA-(ZA) from GCR Ratings, affirmed with a Stable Outlook in November 2025, a rating GCR first assigned in December 2019 and has affirmed every year since. Its parent group, Telesure Investment Holdings (TIH), separately carries GCR’s national scale long-term issuer rating of AA(ZA), also affirmed with a Stable Outlook in the same November 2025 rating action. TIH is a wholly owned subsidiary of UK-based BHL (SA) Holdings Limited, whose own ultimate parent is Guernsey-incorporated BHL Holdings Limited. GCR rates TIH on a standalone sub-group basis, since the Guernsey parent no longer consolidates the group’s results into its own financial statements. Alongside Auto & General, TIH’s principal insurance subsidiaries include Budget Insurance, Dial Direct, First for Women, Renasa, and 1Life, all of which sit under the same rated holding structure. Unlike some younger or unrated insurers, Auto & General has an independently assessed, published credit opinion that buyers can actually check for themselves.
AA-(ZA)
GCR Rating
AA(ZA)
TIH GCR issuer rating
Stable
Both outlook ratings
Since 2019
Rated & affirmed annually
Customer Experience: The Most Current Independent Data
The strongest, most recent independent evidence on Auto & General comes from the 2025 Customer Experience (CE) Index for the short-term insurance industry, a study led by Professor Adré Schreuder, Head of the Industry Chair in Customer Experience at the University of Pretoria, based on a sample of 6,384 South African consumers. Auto & General was named the overall industry leader, scoring 73.7 against an industry average of 69.5, a gap Professor Schreuder specifically described as unusually wide for the sector.
Auto & General also recorded the highest Net Promoter Score, 33, of any insurer measured in the same study. The same research noted that Auto & General’s customers convert that positive sentiment into public reviews, on platforms like Hellopeter, at a comparatively lower rate than some competitors, a nuance worth knowing if you are comparing insurers by online review volume rather than underlying sentiment.
Claims Reliability and Complaints Record
Auto & General states that it is consistently among the insurers with the lowest complaint numbers and lowest overturn rate reported to South Africa’s insurance ombud relative to other large insurers, a claim consistent with its strong showing in the independent 2025 CE Index. This review did not locate a standalone, insurer-specific Ombudsman for Short-Term Insurance or National Financial Ombud Scheme complaint ratio for Auto & General published by the ombud itself, so this claim should be read as the company’s own characterisation, backed by independently sourced customer experience data, rather than as an audited ombud figure.
Is Auto & General Right for You?
Auto & General suits drivers who want a long-established, full-service insurer with a strong, independently measured customer experience track record, and who are comfortable with a mid-to-premium positioning rather than the lowest possible entry price. Its broker-facing Business Insurance channel also makes it a reasonable option for buyers who want the flexibility to deal through an intermediary rather than purely direct. Buyers focused purely on the lowest premium, particularly for older or lower-value vehicles, may find Telesure’s own entry-level brand, Budget Insurance, a closer fit.
Is Auto & General a good car insurance company in South Africa?
Who owns Auto & General?
Does Auto & General have a good complaints record?
What makes Auto & General historically significant?
How is Auto & General different from Budget Insurance?
Does Auto & General have its own credit rating?
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